Building on a conversation begun at last year’s Jali Film Weekender, this lunchtime talk is a space we will return to at each edition, bringing together artists, filmmakers, programmers, cultural workers and community organisers to think collectively about what it means to centre Black, African and diaspora communities within film and the arts.
Last year, we asked how our communities can feel truly seen and included within Scotland’s cultural landscape. This year, we continue that conversation at a moment of heightened hostility towards Black and racialised communities in Scotland and beyond, asking what community-centred cultural work can and must look like in response. Why is creating spaces for our communities to gather, watch, participate and tell their own stories increasingly important? What responsibilities and considerations come with doing this work and how can arts and film spaces resist the narratives, divisions and exclusions taking hold around us?
Host:
Żżo Charlery (Independent Curator, Researcher & Co-Director at Body Remedy)
Speakers:
Ica Headlam (Founder/Director, We Are Here Scotland)
Victoria Nyanga-Ndiaye (Founder & CEO, Project Esperanza SCIO)
Sara Shaarawi (Playwright and Festival Organiser)
Myles Westman (Artist / Programmer)
The talk is presented with a companion screening of John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective’s landmark Handsworth Songs at Filmhouse. Forty years on from its release, Akomfrah’s film essay and its exploration of race, protest, belonging and the ways Black British communities are represented and understood sits in enduringly relevant dialogue with the conversation.
Żżo Charlery
Żżo Charlery is a language-based artist, thinker, writer, and curator based between Glasgow and London working across critical-curatorial practice, transdisciplinary research, and organisational leadership. They practice within the fields of Black Feminist scholarship, Black Study, and tricksterism to care for and question the shape of culture and its reproductions. Żżo works within collaborative structures informed by creative intimacies to construct transdisciplinary materials for inhabiting daily life with intention and openness.
As Co-Director at Body Remedy, Żżo leads research, strategy, and infrastructure for embodied-informed, multi-artform artistic development. Their curatorial and research touchpoints include Africa in Motion Film Festival, the inaugural Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship (Black Waters: Inference to the Veil), and an MScR thesis proposing a Black Feminist material canon through Maud Sulter’s aesthetic theory with the University of Edinburgh.
Ica Headlam
Ica Headlam is the founder and director of We Are Here Scotland, a non-profit organisation that aims to amplify the voices of Black and Global Majority artists and creatives across Scotland through advocacy, mentoring, professional development, events, and collaborative projects. Until 2023 he worked as a qualified children and family’s social worker, with 11 years of experience supporting vulnerable young adults, and families across Aberdeen. In 2017 he started to independently produce and host the fortnightly Creative Me podcast, exploring creativity, art, and culture in the North East of Scotland. Ica is a strong advocate for representation across the arts and values the importance of open and honest dialogue.
Victoria Nyanga-Ndiaye
Victoria Nyanga-Ndiaye is an anti-racism educator, consultant, poet, and founder of Project Esperanza SCIO, working at the intersection of equity, culture, and community empowerment.
Sara Shaarawi
Sara Shaarawi is an Egyptian playwright based in Glasgow. Her work has been performed across Scotland and the UK, as well as internationally. She has written for performance in several contexts, including scripts for audio, making work with/for children and young people, and for nontraditional performance spaces. She often works in contexts that supports the creativity of various groups such as emerging writers, women and nonbinary people, and people with migrant backgrounds and/or experiences of displacement. She often organises events as well, particularly events connected to the Arabic speaking region, such Arab Arts Focus Edinburgh, Welcome to the Fringe Palestine and Chill Habibi.
Myles Westman
Myles Westman is an artist and arts programmer that flits between moving image, sound, text and sculpture, led by speculative and archival research concerning Caribbean funerary rites, Jamaican diasporic culture, Black haptics, and the afterlives of slavery. Through creating multi-media assemblages embedded within Black diasporic vernaculars, they attempt to find apertures of marronage in double-meaning, fugitive practices and opaque affective gestures.
They have recently finished a two-year tenure as an Artist Programmer at Market Gallery [Glasgow] and have exhibited recent work in Atelier de Lorette [Marseille], Strange Field [Glasgow], and as part of Glasgow International Festival.